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THE AMERICANISM OF POE* 

W>*?' eS 

BY C. AlyPHONSO SMITH 
n 

The continental tributes to Poe which were 
read this morning recalled an incident in 
which tRe name of the founder of this Uni¬ 
versity and the name of its most illustrious 
son were suggestively linked together. In 
the Latin Quarter of Paris it was my fortune 
to be thrown for some time into intimate com¬ 
panionship with a young Roumanian named 
Toma Draga. He had come fresh from 
Roumania to the University of Paris and was 
all aflame with stimulant plans and ideals for 
the growth of liberty and literature in his 
native land. His trunk was half filled with 
Roumanian ballads which he had collected 
and in part rewritten and which he wished to 
have published in Paris as his contribution to 
the new movement which was already revolu¬ 
tionizing the politics and the native literature 
of his historic little motherland. He knew not 
a word of English but his knowledge of 
French gave him a sort of eclectic familiarity 
with world literature in general. Shakespeare 

*An address delivered January 19 , 1909 , at the 
University of Virginia, on the hundredth anniver¬ 
sary of Poe’s birth. Reprinted from “The Book of 
the Poe Centenary.” 





V 


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2 THE AMERICANISM OE POE ' 

he knew well, but the two names that were 
most often on his lips were the names of 
Thomas Jefferson and Edgar Allan Poe. 
Time and again he quoted in his impassioned 
way the Declaration of Independence and the 
poems of Poe with an enthusiasm and sense 
of personal indebtedness that will remain to 
me as an abiding inspiration. 

Let the name of Toma Draga stand as evi¬ 
dence that the significance of genius is not ex¬ 
hausted by the written tributes of great 
scholars and critics, however numerous or 
laudatory these may be. There is an ever- 
widening circle of aspiring spirits who do not 
put into studied phrase the formal measure 
of their indebtedness but whose hands have 
received the unflickering torch and whose 
hearts know from whence it came. And let 
the names of Jefferson and Poe, whose far- 
flung battle-lines intersected on this campus, 
forever remind us that this University is dedi¬ 
cated not to the mere routine of recitation 
rooms and laboratories but to the emancipa¬ 
tion of those mighty constructive forces that 
touch the spirits of men to finer aspirations 

and mould their aspirations to finer issues. 

In Exchange 

Uiiiv. of North Carolina 


SEP 2Z-./a33 


THE AMERICANISM OF POE 3 


In an address delivered at the exercises at¬ 
tending the unveiling of the Zolnay bust of 
Poe, Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie declared that 
Poe alone, among men of his eminence, could 
not have been foreseen. “It is,” said he, “the 
first and perhaps the most obvious distinction 
of Edgar Allan Poe that his creative work 
baffles all attempts to relate it historically to 
antecedent condition; that it detached itself 
almost completely from the time and place 
in which it made its appearance, and sprang 
suddenly and mysteriously from a soil which 
had never borne its like before.” That Mr. 
Mabie has here expressed the current concep¬ 
tion of Poe and his work will be conceded by 
every one who is at all in touch with the vast 
body of Poe literature that has grown up since 
the poet’s death. He is regarded as the great 
declasse of American literature, a solitary 
figure, denationalized and almost dehuman¬ 
ized, not only unindebted to his Southern en¬ 
vironment but unrelated to the larger Ameri¬ 
can background,—in a word, a man without a 
country. 

My own feeling about Poe has always been 
different, and the recent edition of the poet’s 


4 THE AMERICANISM OF POE 


works by Professor James A. Harrison, re¬ 
producing almost four volumes of Poe’s 
literary criticism hitherto inaccessible, has con¬ 
firmed a mere impression into a settled con¬ 
viction. The criticism of the future will not 
impeach the primacy of Poe’s genius but will 
dwell less upon detachment from surround¬ 
ings and more upon the practical and repre¬ 
sentative quality of his work. 

The relatedness of a writer to his environ¬ 
ment and to his nationality does not consist 
primarily in his fidelity to local landscape or 
in the accuracy with which he portrays rep¬ 
resentative characters. Byron and Browning 
are essentially representative of their time and 
as truly English as Wordsworth, though the 
note of locality in the narrower sense is negli¬ 
gible in the works of both. They stood, how¬ 
ever, for distinctive tendencies of their time. 
They interpreted these tendencies in essen¬ 
tially English terms and thus both receptively 
and actively proclaimed their nationality. If 
we judge Poe by the purely physical standards 
of locale, he belongs nowhere. His native 
land lies east of the sun and west of the moon. 
His nationality will be found as indeterminate 


THE AMERICANISM OF POE 5 


as that of a fish, and his impress of locality no 
more evident than that of a bird. No land¬ 
scape that he ever sketched could be identified 
and no character that he ever portrayed had 
real human blood in his veins. The repre¬ 
sentative quality in Poe’s work is to be sought 
neither in his note of locality, nor in the 
topics which he preferred to treat, nor in his 
encompassing atmosphere of terror, despair, 
and decay. But the man could not have so 
profoundly influenced the literary craftsman¬ 
ship of his own period and of succeeding 
periods if he had not in a way summarized 
the tendencies of his age and organized them 
into finer literary form. 

If one lobe of Poe’s brain was pure ideality, 
haunted by specters, the other was pure intel¬ 
lect, responsive to the literary demands of his 
day and adequate to their fulfillment. It was 
this lobe of his brain that made him not the 
broadest thinker but the greatest constructive 
force in American literature. He thought in 
terms of structure, for his genius was essen¬ 
tially structural. In the technique of effective 
expression he sought for ultimate principles 
with a patience and persistence worthy of 


6 THE AMERICANISM OF POE 


Washington; he brought to his poems and 
short stories an economy of words and a hus¬ 
bandry of details that suggest the thriftiness 
of Franklin; and he both realized and supplied 
the structural needs of his day with a native 
insight and inventiveness that proclaim him of 
the line of Edison. 

The central question with Poe was not 
“How may I write a beautiful poem or tell 
an interesting story?” but “How may I pro¬ 
duce the maximum of effect with the minimum 
of means?” This practical, scientific strain in 
his work becomes more and more dominating 
during all of his short working period. His 
poems, his stories, and his criticisms cannot 
be thoroughly understood without constant 
reference to this criterion of craftsmanship. 
It became the foundation stone on which he 
built his own work and the touchstone by 
which he tested the work of others. It was 
the first time in our history that a mind so 
keenly analytic had busied itself with the 
problems of literary technique. And yet Poe 
was doing for our literature only what others 
around him were doing or attempting to do 
in the domain of political and industrial 


THE AMERICANISM OF POE 7 


efficiency. The time was ripe, and the note 
that he struck was both national and inter¬ 
national. 

Professor Miinsterberg, 1 of Harvard, thus 
characterizes the intellectual qualities of the 
typical American: “The intellectual make-up 
of the American is especially adapted to 
scientific achievements. This temperament, 
owing to the historical development of the 
nation, has so far addressed itself to political, 
industrial, and judicial problems, but a return 
to theoretical science has set in; and there, 
most of all, the happy combination of inven¬ 
tiveness, enthusiasm, and persistence in pur¬ 
suit of a goal, of intellectual freedom and of 
idealistic instinct for self-perfection will yield, 
perhaps soon, remarkable triumphs.” He 
might have added that these qualities may be 
subsumed under the general term of construct¬ 
iveness and that more than a half century 
ago they found an exemplar in Edgar Allan 
Poe. 

It is a noteworthy fact, and one not suffi¬ 
ciently emphasized, that Poe’s unique influ¬ 
ence at home and abroad has been a structural 


1. In “The Americans,” p. 428. 



8 THE AMERICANISM OE POE 


influence rather than a thought influence. He 
has not suggested new themes to literary- 
artists, nor can his work be called a criticism 
of life; but he has taught prose writers new 
methods of effectiveness in building their plots, 
in handling their backgrounds, in developing 
their situations, and in harmonizing their de¬ 
tails to a preordained end. He has taught 
poets how to modulate their cadences to the 
most delicately calculated effects, how to re- 
enforce the central mood of their poems by 
repetition and parallelism of phrase, how to 
shift their tone-color, how to utilize sound- 
symbolism, how to evoke strange memories 
by the mere succession of vowels, so that the 
simplest stanza may be steeped in a music as 
compelling as an incantation and as cunningly 
adapted to the end in view. The word that 
most fitly characterizes Poe’s constructive art 
is the word convergence. There are no parallel 
lines in his best work. With the opening 
sentence the lines begin to converge toward 
the predetermined effect. This is Poe’s great¬ 
est contribution to the craftsmanship of his 
art. 

Among foreign dramatists and prose writers 


THE AMERICANISM OF POE 9 


whose structural debt to Poe is confessed or 
unquestioned may be mentioned Victorien 
Sardou, Theophile Gautier, Guy de Maupas¬ 
sant, Edmond About, Jules Verne, Emile 
Gaboriau, Robert Eouis Stevenson, Rudyard 
Kipling, Hall Caine, and Conan Doyle. In 
English poetry the debt is still greater. u Poe 
has proved himself,” says the English poet- 
critic Gosse, "to be the Piper of Hamelin to 
all later English poets. From Tennyson to 
Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse 
music does not show traces of Poe’s influence.” 
A German critic, 2 after a masterly review of 
Poe’s work, declares that he has put upon 
English poetry the stamp of classicism, that he 
has infused into it Greek spirit and Greek 
taste, that he has constructed artistic metrical 
forms of which the English language had not 
hitherto been deemed capable. 

But the greatest tribute to Poe’s constructive 
genius is that both by theory and practice he 
is the acknowledged founder of the American 
short story as a distinct literary type. Pro- 

2. Edmund Giindel in “Edgar Allan Poe: ein 
Beitrag zur Kenntnis und Wiirdigung des Dichters,” 
Freiberg, 1895, page 28. 



10 THE AMERICANISM OF POE 


fessor Brander Matthews 3 goes further and 
asserts that 'Toe first laid down the principles 
which governed his own construction and 
which have been quoted very often, because 
they have been accepted by the masters of the 
short story in every modern language.” It 
seems more probable, however, that France 
and America hit upon the new form inde¬ 
pendently, 4 and that the honor of influencing 
the later short stories of England, Germany, 
Russia, and Scandinavia belongs as much to 
French writers as to Poe. 

The growth of Poe’s constructive sense 
makes a study of rare interest. He had been 
editor of the Southern Literary Messenger 

3. See “The Short-Story: Specimens Illustrating 
Its Development,” 1907, page 25. 

4. “ ‘La Morte Amoureuse’ [by Gautier], though 
it has not Poe’s mechanism of compression, is other¬ 
wise so startlingly like Poe that one turns involun¬ 
tarily to the dates. ‘Da Morte Amoureuse’ appeared 
in 1836; ‘Berenice,’ in 1835. The Southern Literary 
Messenger could not have reached the boulevards 
in a year. Indeed, the debt of either country to the 
other can hardly be proved. Remarkable as is the 
coincident appearance in Paris and in Richmond of 
a new literary form, it remains a coincidence.”—In¬ 
troduction to Professor Charles Sears Baldwin’s 
“American Short Stories” (in the Wampum Li¬ 
brary), 1904, page 33. 



THE AMERICANISM OF POE 11 


only two months when in comparing the 
poems of Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Hemans 
he used a phrase in which he may be said to 
have first found himself structurally. This 
phrase embodied potentially his distinctive 
contribution to the literary technique of his 
day. “In pieces of less extent,” he writes, 5 
“like the poems of Mrs. Sigourney, the 
pleasure is unique, in the proper acceptation 
of that term—the understanding is employed, 
without difficulty, in the contemplation of 
the picture as a whole —and thus its effect 
will depend, in a very great degree, upon the 
perfection of its finish, upon the nice adap¬ 
tation of its constituent parts, and especially 
upon what is rightly termed by Schlegel the 
unity or totality of interest” Further on in 
the same paragraph he substitutes “totality 
of effect.” 

Six years later 6 he published his now 
famous criticism of Hawthorne’s “Twice- 
Told Tales,” a criticism that contains, in 
one oft-quoted paragraph, the constitution 
of the modern short story as distinct from 


5. Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1836. 

6. In Graham's Magazine, May, 1842. 



12 THE AMERICANISM OF POE 


the story that is merely short. After calling 
attention to the “immense force derivable 
from totality,” he continues: “A skillful 
literary artist has constructed a tale. If 
wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to 
accommodate his incidents; but having con¬ 
ceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique 
or single effect to be wrought out, he then 
invents such incidents,—he then combines 
such events as may best aid him in establishing 
this preconceived effect. If his very initial 
sentence tend not' to the outbringing of this 
effect, then he has failed in his first step. In 
the whole composition there should be no 
word written, of which the tendency, direct 
or indirect, is not to the one preestablished 
design. And by such means, with such care 
and skill, a picture is at length painted which 
leaves in the mind of him who contemplates 
it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest 
satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been 
presented unblemished, because undisturbed; 
and this is an end unattainable by the novel.” 

In 1846 he publishes his “Philosophy of 
Composition” 7 in which he analyzes the 


7. In the April number of Graham's Magazine, 



THE AMERICANISM OF POE 13 


structure of “The Raven” and declares that 
he confined the poem to about one hundred 
lines so as to secure “the vastly important 
artistic element, totality or unity of effect.” 
In 1847, in a review of Hawthorne’s “Mosses 
from an Old Manse,” he republishes 8 with 
hardly the change of a word the portions 
of his former review emphasizing the im¬ 
portance of “totality of effect.” The year 
after his death his popular lecture on “The 
Poetic Principle” is published, 9 in which 
he contends that even “The Iliad” and 
“Paradise Lost” have had their day because 
their length deprives them of “totality of 
effect.” 

This phrase, then, viewed in its later 
development, is not only the most significant 
phrase that Poe ever used but the one that 
most adequately illustrates his attitude as 
critic, poet, and story writer. It will be 
remembered that when he first used the 
phrase he attributed it to William Schlegel. 
The phrase is not found in Schlegel, nor any 


8. In the November number of Godey’s Lady's 
Book. 

9. In Sartain’s Union Magazine, October, 1850. 



14 THE AMERICANISM OE POE 


phrase analogous to it. Schlegel’s “Lec¬ 
tures on Dramatic Art and Literature” had 
been translated into English, and in Poe’s 
other citations from this great work he 
quotes accurately. But in this case he was 
either depending upon a faulty memory or, 
as is more probable, he was invoking the 
prestige of the great German to give 
currency and authority to a phrase which 
he himself coined and which, more than any 
other phrase that he ever used, expressed 
his profoundest conviction about the archi¬ 
tecture of literature. The origin of the 
phrase is to be sought not in borrowing but 
rather in the nature of Poe’s genius and 
in the formlessness of the contemporary 
literature upon which as critic he was called 
to pass judgment. Had Poe lived long 
enough to read Herbert Spencer’s “Philoso¬ 
phy of Style,” in which economy of the 
reader’s energies is made the sum total of 
literary craftsmanship, he would doubtless 
have promptly charged the Englishman with 
plagiarism, though he would have been the 
first to show the absurdity of Spencer’s con¬ 
tention that the difference between poetry 


THE AMERICANISM OF POE 15 


and prose is a difference only in the degree 
of economy of style. 

Schlegel, it may be added, could not have 
exerted a lasting influence upon Poe. The 
two men had little in common. Schlegel’s 
method was not so much analytic as historical 
and comparative. His vast learning gave 
him control of an almost illimitable field of 
dramatic criticism while Poe’s limitations 
made his method essentially individual and 
intensive. The man to whom Poe owed most 
was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The influence 
of Coleridge grew upon Poe steadily. Both 
represented a curious blend of the dreamer 
and the logician. Both generalized with 
rapidity and brilliancy. Both were masters 
of the singing qualities of poetry, and both 
were persistent investigators of the principles 
of meter and structure. Though Coleridge 
says nothing about “totality of effect” 10 

10 . The nearest approach is in chapter XIV of the 
“Biographia Literaria:” “A poem is that species of 
composition, which is opposed to works of science, 
by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not 
truth; and from all other species (having this object 
in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing 
to itself such delight from the whole, as is compati¬ 
ble with a distinct gratification from each component 
part.” 



16 THE AMERICANISM OF POE 


and would not have sanctioned Poe’s appli¬ 
cation of the phrase, it is undoubtedly true 
that Poe found in Coleridge his most 
fecundating literary influence. 

In his admiration for Coleridge and in 
his antipathy to Carlyle, Poe was thoroughly 
representative of the South of his day. The 
great Scotchman’s work was just beginning 
and Coleridge’s career had just closed 
when Poe began to be known. Carlyle and 
Coleridge were both spokesmen of the great 
transcendental movement which originated 
in Germany and which found a hospitable 
welcome in New England. But transcen¬ 
dentalism in New England meant a fresh 
scrutiny of all existing institutions, social, 
political, and religious. It was identified 
with Unitarianism, Fourierism, the renuncia¬ 
tion of dogma and authority, and the increas¬ 
ing agitation of abolition. “Communities 
were established,” says Lowell, “where every¬ 
thing was to be common but common sense.” 
The South had already begun to be on the 
defensive and now looked askance at the 
whole movement. Coleridge, however, like 
Burke and Wordsworth, had outgrown his 


THE AMERICANISM OF POE 17 


radicalism and come back into the settled 
ways of institutional peace and orderliness. 
His writings, especially his “Biographia 
Literaria,” his “Statesman’s Manual,” and 
his “Lay Sermon,” were welcomed in the 
South not only because of their charm of 
style but because they mingled profound 
philosophy with matured conservatism. No 
one can read the lives of the Southern leaders 
of ante-bellum days without being struck 
by the immense influence of Coleridge and 
the tardy recognition of Carlyle’s message. 
When Emerson, therefore, in 1836, has 
“Sartor Resartus” republished in Boston, 
and Poe at the same time urges in the 
Southern Literary Messenger the republica¬ 
tion of the “Biographia Literaria,” both are 
equally representative of their sections. 

But Poe as the disciple of Coleridge rather 
than of Carlyle is not the less American 
because representatively Southern. The in¬ 
tellectual activity of the South from 1830 
to 1850 has been on the whole underrated 
because that activity was not expended upon 
the problems which wrought so fruitfully 
upon the more responsive spirits of New 


18 THE AMERICANISM OF POE 


England, among whom flowered at last the 
ablest group of writers that this country 
has known. The South cared nothing for 
novel views of inspiration, for radical reforms 
in church, in state, or in society. Proudly 
conscious of her militant and constructive 
role in laying the foundations of the new 
republic, the South after 1830 was devoting 
her energies to interpreting and conserving 
what the fathers had sanctioned. This work, 
however, if not so splendidly creative as 
that of earlier times, was none the less 
constructive in its way and national in its 
purpose. Poe’s formative years, therefore, 
were spent in a society rarely trained in subtle 
analysis, in logical acumen, and in keen 
philosophic interpretation. 

Though Poe does not belong to politics 
or to statesmanship, there was much in com¬ 
mon between his mind and that of John C. 
Calhoun, widely separated as were their 
characters and the arenas on which they 
played their parts. Both were keenly alive 
to the implications of a phrase. Both 
reasoned with an intensity born not of im¬ 
pulsiveness but of sheer delight in making 


THE AMERICANISM OF POE 19 


delicate distinctions. Both showed in their 
choice of words an element of the pure 
classicism that lingered longer in the South 
than in New England or Old England; and 
both illustrated an individual independence 
more characteristic of the South then than 
would be possible amid the leveling influences 
of to-day. When Baudelaire defined genius 
as ‘Taffirmation de l’independance indi- 
viduelle,” he might have had both Poe and 
Calhoun in mind; but when he adds “c’est 
le self-government applique aux oeuvres 
d’art,” only Poe could be included. Both, 
however, were builders, the temple of the 
one visible from all lands, that of the other 
scarred by civil war but splendid in the very 
cohesiveness of its structure. 

I have dwelt thus at length upon the 
constructive side of Poe’s genius because it 
is this quality that makes him most truly 
American and that has been at the same time 
almost ignored by foreign critics. Baudelaire, 
in his wonderfully sympathetic appraisal 
of Poe, considers him, however, as the 
apostle of the exceptional and abnormal. 


20 THE AMERICANISM OF POE 


Eauvriere, 11 in the most painstaking inves¬ 
tigation yet bestowed upon an American 
author, views him chiefly as a pathological 
study. Moeller-Bruck, 12 the editor of the 
latest complete edition of Poe in Germany, 
sees in him “a dreamer from the old mother¬ 
land of Europe, a Germanic dreamer.” Poe 
was a dreamer, an idealist of idealists; and 
it is true that idealism is a trait of the 
American character. But American idealism 
is not of the Poe sort. American idealism 
is essentially ethical. It concerns itself 
primarily with conduct. Poe’s Americanism 
is to be sought not in his idealism but in the 
sure craftsmanship, the conscious adaptation 
of means to end, the quick realization of 
structural possibilities, the practical handling 
of details, which enabled him to body forth 
his visions in enduring forms and thus to 
found the only new type of literature that 
America has originated. 

The new century upon which Poe’s name 
now enters will witness no diminution of 

11. “Edgar Poe, sa vie et son oeuvre: etude de 
psychologie pathologique.” Paris, 1904. 

12. “E. A. Poe’s Samtliche Werke.” Minden i. W., 


1904. 



THE AMERICANISM OF POE 21 


interest in his work. It will witness, however, 
a changed attitude toward it. Men will ask 
not less what he did but more how he 
did it. This scrutiny of the principles of his 
art will reveal the elements of the normal, 
the concrete, and the substantial, in which 
his work has hitherto been considered defective. 
It will reveal also the wide service of Poe to 
his fellow-craftsmen and the yet wider 
service upon which he enters. To inaugurate 
the new movement there is no better time 
than the centennial anniversary of his birth, 
and no better place than here where his 
genius was nourished. 









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